Oldham College

Complex socio-cultural, psychological, geographical, and service-related challenges are faced when recruiting people with dementia for clinical trials. The aim of Phase 1 of the Dementia PersonAlised Care Team (D-PACT) project was to assess the feasibility of recruiting (identifying, approaching and consenting) people with dementia, including those without capacity to consent, to a cluster randomized controlled trial of a primary care-based personalized dementia support intervention in England. COVID-19 necessitated a shift to remote working, creating the opportunity to compare recruitment strategies before and under lockdown constraints. This paper shares the adaptations made to enable remote consent and capacity judgement with people with dementia, as well as lessons learned. Consent was conducted in person from September 2019 to March 2020. Remote consent was implemented from September 2020 to March 2021 after an enforced pause. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Recruitment rates (proportion consented from eligible patients approached), mean monthly consent rates, and time spent on consent-related activities (tasks before and after consent/capacity-judgment meetings, miscellaneous tasks, travel) were compared. Participant experiences with remote recruitment were examined through thematic analysis of qualitative interviews. Pre-COVID-19, 22 participants (9.9%) out of 228 approached were consented in person. During the pandemic, 19 participants (9.6%) out of 198 were consented remotely, excluding 15 participants initially approached pre-pandemic and later consented via remote means. Mean monthly consent rates increased from 3.6 (in person) to 5.6 (remote). However, remote consent required more time (mean 14 researcher-hours per participant vs. 9 in person), with 75% of time spent on consent-related tasks compared to 20% in person. Travel accounted for 40% of in-person consent time. Interviews (n = 13) showed general acceptability of remote processes. However pre-consent information was perceived as excessive and led some participants to skim materials, potentially reducing understanding. While remote consent is time-intensive, it achieves comparable rates (proportion consented/total approached) to in-person methods and higher monthly consent rates. A flexible, hybrid approach can enhance participation, offer choice, and increase person-centredness. Realistic planning for time and resources is crucial for inclusive dementia research. Funders should support these needs to ensure effective recruitment. ISRCTN80204146.

In collaboration with NetProphets Cyberworks Pvt Ltd, Noida, IndiaI, I develop smartphone applications for epilepsy in low-resource settings. I think that this is an excellent, well-argued, and comprehensible review of what is always a difficult subject, and one which invariably stimulates discussion. Here are a number of comments: 1. The health inequalities which the authors mention could be regarded as a failure of traditional face-to-face medicine (FF). Adding telemedicine (TM) can surely improve this. 2. There are essentially only two reasons for doing TM 1 : first, if there is no other option, and second, because it may offer higher quality care than FF. What are the ethics of not offering TM to someone who would benefit from it? By depriving a patient of beneficence, this is surely unethical. This is a point seldom discussed. 3. A data breach from electronically-stored patient information may apply to FF medicine as well, if there is an electronic medical record. As there is, for example, in Rwanda. Conversely, a telephone consultation (TM) may be recorded on paper-based records and not have any electronic footprint 2 . 4. There is probably no system of electronic storage which is 100% resistant to hacking. If there is a data breach, it seems unreasonable to hold the referring health care worker (HCW) responsible, as the authors seem to imply. 5. Equity for rural dwellers is far more likely to be achieved by TM than FF, since most specialists live in the cities, and many patients cannot afford the time and expense of getting to see them FF. Similarly, FF private practice would seem to be contrary to the justice construct, since it discriminates against people on economic grounds. 6. The authors are well placed to draw up some regulatory guidelines on this issue. I suggest that these should include both FF and TM in their scope. But as well as treading the thin line, they should use a light touch, since over-zealous regulation, by putting HCWs off using TM, may itself be unethical.

The paper titled Beyond culture shock: entering the complex world of Global South expatriates' adaptation is a general review which offers a literature-informed conceptual framework articulating the antecedents of issues facing Global South expatriates in relation to adaptation in Western contexts. The paper offers an informative account of the literature reviewed on expatriates from Global South, however, the methods used to develop the conceptual framework of this paper are not fully clear. Overall, communication is effective throughout although academic writing and word choice errors can be addressed to improve overall quality of this paper.

April 22nd, 1962 (date totally random)

Definitely not for ourselves, as some people seem to think. We (including our clients) are not the ones that will be using the website, and we are not the ones that will benefit from it (aside from getting paid for our “hard” labor). This is something that a lot of people in the creative, digital, online, or offline industry seem to be neglecting: the importance of knowing the audience we’re addressing.

The year was 2004. I can’t really tell what the weather was like, but given the fact I was born and grew up in Athens, Greece, you can pretty much assume it was a nice, warm, and bright morning. One of the modules I had to do as part of my geography studies was web mapping, and what we had to learn to complete the course was HTML and CSS. Web mapping is basically using any map you have produced, on the Internet. We’d take the spatial data, visualize them, and then use a web-based platform to view and analyze whatever we created. And we had to make that platform ourselves (which back then was basically an iframe on a web page with basic controls, like zoom in/out and pan up and down).

Yes. I mean, kind of.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of the concept of the “implied graduate” to explain the difficulties which students report when engaging with local employers. Design/methodology/approach – The “implied graduate” is an analytical concept that aims to bring together assumptions about what a graduate should be like. In this paper the concept has been used to analyse interview data collected from students after they took part in an employability project at a small Higher Education (HE) campus in a Further Education (FE) College. Findings – The students in this study reported significant issues with continuing to engage and maintain contact with the employers they met during the project. For many, this was the first time they had met graduate level employers and so felt inexperienced in how to approach networking with them. It seems that some of the offers for future contact made by the employers were aimed at an “implied graduate” and, as such, the students struggled to fulfil those expectations. Originality/value – This paper sheds light on the difficulties that HE in FE students face in engaging with graduate employers. These issues are likely to contribute to the well-established, but unexplained, differences in employment outcomes for students from diverse backgrounds.

Working under the guidance of your tutors, you will: examine detailed examples of the main types of assignments introduced in Unit 4 which you will meet on your course; work through the assignments to develop your knowledge and skills.